by Da'Von B.

Suppose you were the CEO of Apple in 2005 when a couple of intergalactic visitors with time-warping technology offered you this bet:

Design and manufacture a small mobile device that seamlessly combines the functionalities of a cellular phone, a web surfer, an audio/video player and a small PC, and your company will double its market cap and establish a third mass-market computing platform after Windows and Macintosh.

Would you take it?

Before you say, “Are you nuts, why wouldn’t I?” ponder just a few of the issues involved:

It won’t be possible to enter this market quietly or modestly and hope to grow slowly (like with Xserve a few years earlier). Yours will have to be a blockbuster entry. You are good in raising awareness and expectations around a product but that raises the consequences of failure exponentially.